


it's always ourselves we find in the sea

by politik



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bisexual Steve Rogers, Canon Divergence - Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, F/M, M/M, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Slow Burn, Steve Rogers-centric, Superhuman Registration Act, This is a roadtrip of sorts, very plotty
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:02:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23974963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/politik/pseuds/politik
Summary: Who would you even be without a war?Steven Grant Rogers. In the beginning, and in the aftermath.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov & Sam Wilson
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	it's always ourselves we find in the sea

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally supposed to be an entry in the 2018 Captain America Big Bang, which I've now found the time to finish.
> 
> Title taken from the e e cummings poem, "maggie and milly and molly and may".

* * *

You fall and it hurts, but it hurts much less than watching him fall. 

Through swollen eyes, you see him above you, arm raised, but you can’t see his face. Debris eclipses him and he’s gone, then he’s there again. He’s just an outline of a man against the inferno. He’s fading from your view and there is nothing to grab onto, nothing to stop your descent. No time to form a thought beyond: _is this how he felt_? You fall further and further from him and the swooping in your stomach feels like it did when you watched him leave all those years ago, off to fight a war in a world far from home, far from you. Then your back hits the water and your lungs nearly burst from the shock of the impact that tries to send water rushing through your stubborn lips.

You sink. 

And sink. 

And sink.

You are intimately acquainted with how it feels to drown; how your lungs burn and burn until you need to let water in to soothe the fire in them, how everything slows down and you can’t move and you can’t struggle and all you can do is let go, and even that isn’t always a way out for someone like you. You try to move your arms, try to swim because you’re still the kid from Brooklyn, still the man who didn’t know how to stay down after a fight. But this isn’t Brooklyn, this isn’t a street fight — his voice echoes: _this isn’t a back alley, Steve, it’s war_ — and now there is nothing left of you. He took everything when he sent you sprawling into the river. You’re gone for him. Gone with him. You hear muddled splashes and feel objects crash into you as the wreckage rains into the water. You can’t move to avoid them. You think, _how did I lose you?_

The pain in your chest is too much and then you finally gasp in a mouthful of cool river. There’s no air, no relief. Just water. It steals your breath like a kiss, and you are going to die here, you know it, in the river, in the murky water. After a fall — just like him.

_I’m sorry_ , you think. He’ll never hear it. _I’m sorry._

Then you let go.

* * *

You were born in the twilight of war to a proud woman and a dead man. Your father died before he could meet you, before your mother had picked a name. You had no pictures of him growing up — you never knew what he looked like. He is a faceless shape in your mind, and you only know that you did not look like him, and that did not help you very much at all when there are a million and one other possible ways for him to look besides _not like you, sweetheart_. Your mother used to tell you stories about him though, this stranger whose name you bear like a cross, stories about where he was born, the foods he liked, the day he proposed to her. Once, she read you the letters he wrote to her during the war. They were the only things of his she still had after he passed. He died on the battlefield and it was not glorious like it is in the novels and all the movies. It was a painful, useless death, so she told you. He was a casualty in what was supposed to be the war to end all wars; you know now that it was a lie, that war never stops, it just changes shape.

War changes shape and it has shaped you, the boy with more fight in him than air in his lungs. All your life, you’ve had to fight for things. For food, for money, for your life, for the world. You took your first breath in the air of a dying war, and every breath that came after was its own battle that only stopped when they forged you anew. When did you become a soldier? Was it when you enlisted? Was it in basic, or in Howard Stark’s metal chamber? No, that wasn’t it — before then, surely. Was it on the streets of Brooklyn when you punched and kicked and scrapped your way out of your first fight? When?

Maybe you have always been one, for you have always been Steve Rogers: crusader against schoolyard bullies and back-alley thieves and general wrong-doers. Violence is inside of you even though you don’t want it to be, and it’s a festering, rotten thing. You don’t want to be this way, but it’s the only way you’ve ever known. You don’t know how not to be a soldier. You don’t know how to quit the fight. You don’t know who you would be without blood in your mouth and bruises on your knuckles and breath screaming in your lungs. 

Who would you even be without a war?

* * *

The first time you woke in the hospital, everything was hazy. Sam was there — he was playing music. He was on your left. But the sensations of your body were off. Distant. Muddled. Your body is good at compartmentalizing pain, pushing it to a far-off place so that you can rest at the most critical moments. You can step outside yourself when it’s too bad, pretend the body writhing on a bed is not your own. The pain was remote on that first day of wakefulness. It isn’t now.

Natasha is with you this time, curled up in a chair pulled close to your bed. She’s wearing sweatpants. You never knew she owned sweatpants. You’ve only ever seen her dressed in leather and jeans and cunning wit. Her hand rests over one of your own, squeezing it when you clench your fists in pain, releasing as you relax. The hours after you fell into the river are a blur, but you remember the feel of those hands on your face, soft and slipping on the sweat that slid down your temples and into your hair as people prodded and cut and sewed your skin back together. You remember the sound of her voice in your ear, low and steady, and maybe you don’t remember her words, but you heard her. You felt her. She was there, and now she’s here, and she’s staying.

“Relax, Rogers,” she says as you squeeze your eyes tight as the muscles in your thigh cramp against the incision that’s there, long and ugly. “It’s only going to get worse if you keep moving and clenching your muscles.”

“You try relaxing,” you grit through your teeth.

“Just try to sleep.”

She moves her hand up to run through your hair, rubbing circles into your scalp. A lifetime ago — or was it only a few years? — this was your mother soothing you through a fever, bundling you up and holding you close. You can hear her voice if you let yourself think about her, soft and warm as an old blanket. You wonder what she would think of you now, if she saw you. You wonder if she would recognize the man you’ve become. Natasha’s fingers are almost as soothing as hers, almost like home. You can feel your fingers loosen from their hold on the sheets — you hadn’t realized you had been clenching them so tightly. Slowly, your muscles begin to relax. You hear her whisper, “That’s it, Steve, that’s it,” as you start to drift off. 

You settle into a light doze, the pulsing pain keeping you from truly getting a deep sleep. It’s not entirely restful. Though your limbs have the simultaneously heavy and weightless feeling they get when you’re about to go to bed, you can’t get his face out of your head, can’t stop hearing his voice: _you’re my mission, you’re my mission, you’re my mission_ , plays over and over again in your mind. But you feel Natasha’s fingers in your hair, chasing those thoughts away. _Do you trust me_ , they say, and you do, god, you do. Her fingers are almost enough to chase the Bucky in your dreams away, almost enough —

The door opens unexpectedly and it breaks through the memory of Bucky’s mantra. You wrench open your eyes to see Natasha jump to her feet, drawing a gun from a seemingly implausible place in her hoodie and then train it on the door. You follow her gaze and see a shocked Tony Stark, dressed impeccably in a three piece suit, which is bizarre enough — Tony normally wears jeans and band shirts that he thinks make him look artfully uncaring when he’s not going to a meeting or press conference. He holds up his hands in surrender, a StarkPad in one of them with muffled noise is coming from it, like he’s been watching a video. His eyes are wide but his voice is light as he says, “Paranoid much, Romanoff? Anyone ever tell you that?”

“Not to my face,” she says. She’s still got her gun raised.

“No, I suppose most people have greater self-preservation instincts than I do. What if I had been hospital staff? Hmm?”

“See, Natasha, you’ve just got to _relax_ ,” you say, wincing as you try to raise yourself into a seated position.

She puts the gun away and says, “Stop _moving_.” She turns her gaze on Tony, and she looks unimpressed. “You really know how to make an entrance, Stark.” 

“And you really know how to make your guests feel welcome, don’t you?,” he says, smirking at her. Then he slides his eyes away from the gun in her hands and over to you and you can see it in his face, the moment he really sees you. His jaw slackens a bit as he takes in your sweaty, quivering form on the sheets. “Well, shit Rogers. Rocky looked like a million bucks compared to you at the end of that movie.”

“I still haven’t seen that one — it’s still on the list,” you say, shifting a bit.

Natasha sighs and turns back to you, reaching down to hit a button that raises your bed into a seated position. The muscles in your neck thank her profusely. 

“What’s going on, Stark?” asks Natasha, folding her arms to her chest and studying him. 

His eyebrows shoot up and he waves his pad in your direction. Now you can see the screen — it looks like some sort of hearing is taking place and if you focus, you can hear Alexander Pierce speaking calmly into a microphone. “What’s going _on_? You just blew up a super-secret spy organization and exposed all of their super-secret spy intel, and you’re really asking me that question? It’s all over the press — Rumlow, the Winter Soldier. All of it. I’ve had JARVIS run through all the stuff you put out there to see if there’s anything compromising for the Avengers, but it’s going to take a long time to sort through that mess you've made.”

“Leave it all out there, Tony. People deserve to know what’s happening,” you say.

Tony narrows his eyes at you, back stiffening slightly. “Yeah, transparency is great and all, but you didn’t just expose _your_ secrets — you exposed all of us. Thanks for that, by the way, you two. Really awesome of you. My company? Tanked if we don’t secure our designs and patents before the rest of the wannabes decide that it would be a fantastic idea to design their own suits and repulsors.”

“You flew all the way down here,” says Natasha slowly, “to lecture us about intellectual property rights.”

He rolls his eyes to the sky. “I came down here to lecture you about the merits of teamwork. New York is hardly an hour away in the suit. I don’t want to have to watch Spangles over here fall from the sky through the plasma screen in my living room.”

His voice is light, but his eyes are not. The suit makes more sense, now that you think of it. This is Tony grasping for control, taking the time to care for every detail for once. He’s holding the pad close to him now; he’s nervous around you because he feels something for you both. Tony was _afraid_ for you both. Your relationship has come a long way in the past two years.

“There wasn’t time or any sort of secure line,” you say, meeting his gaze. “But I really am sorry. How’re you — how’s the team?”

He rolls his eyes again. “The only one of us who isn’t fine is you, billions of dollars of research and development that’s on the line notwithstanding. You had Pepper worried.”

His words make the throbbing in your chest and stomach — forgotten in the wake of his entrance — more apparent. “You can tell _Pepper_ that I heal fast,” you say, before you can say how you really feel. Your skin is tougher than it was before the serum, harder to tear at, but it still can break. It’s broken now. It hurts now.

Tony stares at you for a long moment, and you know he can see past the words. He’s been here before; he knows the game. He’s quiet for a moment, taking in your bruised eyes and stitched cheek. He finally takes a deep breath and says, “They haven’t found him, you know.”

“Barnes,” says Natasha. It’s not a question.

He shakes his head, and you close your eyes in relief. You don’t know what you want, haven’t since Bucky shot at you and beat you, since his fist went into your face over and over and over again. _Sometimes_ , he told you once, all those years ago, _I think you like getting punched_. And maybe you didn’t really believe him then, but you do now that you know the feeling of his hands gripping you tightly around the throat, taking all the air from your lungs and leaving you a gasping, breathless thing. It was the closest you’ve been to each other in decades and years and years. His hands were kinder, once, and you think: you do not know the Winter Soldier, but you do know Bucky Barnes, and you know that he does not want to hurt you, that he’s lost and scared and searching for the person who he was. Somewhere, he’s waiting to be found.

“I’ve got JARVIS looking for him, too,” says Tony, and the compassion in his voice is evident as he finally moves to sit by your bed. “He can’t stay off the grid permanently, right?”

You close your eyes and picture Project Insight looming ominously in the carrier bay, able to reduce every person on the globe to a number, a pinprick on a map. This is not 1945. There are computers everywhere, and satellites, and more people around the world than you could have imagined when you were younger. You think of your plane, frozen in a wasteland only to be uncovered — impossibly — decades later. He can’t evade you forever. He will be found.

“No,” you say, “I don’t suppose he can.”

* * *

Father Simon died on a Tuesday in early March when you were five. They held the funeral at St. Paul’s a few days later on a clear, cold day. It was where your father’s funeral was held before you were born, where your parents got married, where your mother said you would attend school in the fall. You had never been before outside of Sunday services and Christmas mass, and something about the vaulting ceiling made you feel even smaller than you actually were as you walked down the aisle in an ill-fitting suit that was handed down to you from your neighbor. It seemed as though the whole of Brooklyn showed up although you know this can’t be true — St. Paul’s was a tiny church, and the neighborhood was never predominantly Catholic. But it felt that way to you then as your mother nudged you to take a seat between her and the aisle.

The service was long, or maybe it just seemed that way to you because you were young. The ladies cried into their handkerchiefs, and the men bowed their heads, and the other children like you fidgeted restlessly. The new Father blessed Simon’s body and your souls, and allowed each of you to pay your respects. Your mother took your hand and led you to the queue where you waited to see a man you had hardly had the chance to know. 

When you saw him, you were struck by how old he looked. You had been dying since the day you were born, but never before had you been so close to death. You’d never had a chance to truly see what it meant. His face was tired and gray and powdered, and his priest’s robes were tightly pressed. There was no flush to his cheeks or twitch of his chest. There was nothing. And though you were used to the feeling of dying — had never known anything but it — you became acutely aware of the feeling of the pulse in your wrists, a beating heart that reached down to your toes. You felt the air whistle through your too-small lungs and it was as if it were your first breath ever, and maybe it was. There was a dead man laying before you, but you breathed in and you were alive, you were _alive_ , _you were alive_.

_Steve_ , said your mother, nudging you slightly to bow your head. _What do we say?_

You bowed your head but kept your eyes trained on the worn face of Father Simon. You said, slightly slower than your mother as you listened to her pray: _Eternal rest, grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them._ Your pulse beat loudly in your ears, stretched to your fingertips. _May the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace._

She clasped your hand tightly, and you felt her wondrous heart beat straight into you. 

_Amen_.

* * *

Tony takes you, Natasha, and Sam to Stark Tower when you’re released from the hospital. The apartment in Dupont is an absolute mess when you arrive to pick up your remaining personal items. Blood stains the wooden floors from when Fury bled out in your hands, and bullets have torn apart the walls and the books and most of the furniture. While the three of them wait in the car, you pack your clothes and shoes and toiletries and the compass with Peggy’s picture in it — somehow preserved after all those years in water and ice — and say goodbye without another glance. It had never quite been a home.

There’s nothing left for you in D.C. anymore. Your life had been your job; intelligence reports on terrorist cells, missions with Natasha and occasionally Clint, meetings with Fury. From the moment after you helped to save the world from Loki and the Chitauri, SHIELD had been your life. You had nothing else to do back then. (And a small part of you kept thinking of Peggy. Peggy, and SHIELD, and everything she created that you've now helped destroy). SHIELD is gone, and you are hurt, and now there’s nothing left but family — the Avengers — and New York.

The ride up 95 is quieter than the one you and Natasha took a mere week before. The view is the same, but the weight on your chest presses differently. There is no adrenaline rush pushing you faster to Camp Lehigh. There is no anticipation of the end of the world. There is just Tony driving, his fingers twitching on the dashboard; Sam dozing in the passenger seat; Natasha staring blankly out the window, her fingers drifting to yours every now and then as if to assure her that you’re still there.

“Bruce and Clint are already at the Tower,” says Tony quietly enough so Sam doesn’t wake. “Got there last night. I’m assuming Thor will be there soon, too, but it’s not like I could give him a ring.”

Natasha says nothing as you hum in agreement. Her eyes are trained on the trees zipping past.

Tony continues, softer when Sam grunts and twitches in his sleep: “They wanted to visit you before you were released, but … but they both thought it would probably be best to keep out of the public eye. They’ve been worried about you.”

His eyes find yours in the rearview mirror, wide and concerned. Natasha takes your hand again and gives it a silent squeeze.

“It will be good to see them,” you say around the lump in your throat. When you first woke after the ice, you hadn’t thought you would find friends like you’d had during the war. But you do. You have people who care about _you_ , not Captain America. And you care about them.

“They’re all set up in the Tower. You’ve all got your own rooms, the ones you used after the Chitauri. We — we all need a chance to regroup. Together.”

“They’re safe?” You think about the data dump — a move that was so simple, so genius to you at the time — and can’t help but think about Clint’s family, and Bruce’s work. The more you reflect on it, the more horrors you can imagine happening to everyone you still care about.

“As safe as they can ever be, in our line of work,” says Tony, his lips quirked slightly. 

You swallow and return Natasha’s squeeze. “Good.”

In the distance, the skyline of Manhattan comes into view between the smokestacks along the turnpike. Through the hazy smog, you can see Stark Tower reaching up to scrape the sky. New York is where you all first met and came together. But you think of New York — of Brooklyn, of Bucky, of your mother — and you know it’s home in more ways than one.

* * *

Bucky liked to pretend he didn’t know how the two of you met. He told the Commandos all sorts of outrageous stories when they asked, just to get a laugh out of them. He saved you from bullies behind the movie theater in Brooklyn; he saved you from the nuns after they caught you passing around the dirty pictures Micky Halloran swiped from his older brother outside of the school; he saved you from the police after you tried to rob a bank; he saved you from old Mrs. Mastriano as she tried to feed your stringy little body to her guard dogs chained to the fence outside the family shop; he saved you from a burning tenement building that you probably set on fire yourself because _who ever let you cook was a goddamn moron Steve, you could burn water if given the chance_ ; he saved you from the killer aliens that H.G. Wells predicted would invade the world. You laughed at all of the stories and smiled because you knew the truth and by the glint in his eyes, you knew he did, too.

What really happened was this: you met him on the street outside of a dress shop one day when you were six, a tiny wisp of a thing struggling to stay out from underfoot lest you get trampled by people in the crowded street. He was standing outside of the store, his arms straining to clutch two grocery bags close to his chest, and he kept looking left to right with watery eyes as people pushed past him. You saw panic in his gaze and your feet took you toward him without thinking. He looked lost.

His eyes found yours right before you reached him, and you recognized the relief in them as he saw that you meant to help. You stopped in front of him and looked up — he was taller than you then, much taller even though he wasn’t that much older than you — and asked, _What’s wrong_?

_I can’t find my way home_ , he said, and you could hear the barely restrained panic in his voice. _I don’t know where to go_.

_Where do you live_?

_I don’t_ know _, that’s the problem!_ he said, and the tears started flowing stubbornly from his eyes. He sniffled loudly to try to halt their progress. _I just moved here a week ago and my ma told me to go get groceries, and I thought I knew the way but I don’t, and there’s too many people and she’s going to be so mad if I don’t come home and —_

_Hey, stop_ , you said, and you reached out to steady him as he started to shake, the grocery bags threatening to drop him his arms. _Do you remember where you came from_?

_Indiana_ , said Bucky through the tears.

You didn’t know which cross street Indiana was, but you nodded and said, _Sure_. _What’s your building look like_?

_Big_ , he said unhelpfully. Then: _It’s gray and tall, and it’s by a big bridge. My pop says it’s new_.

You knew the building he was talking about, the one that had just gone up by the Brooklyn Bridge a few years prior. It was nicer than yours, closer to Manhattan, with bigger apartments and a better view. It wasn’t close to your own apartment, but you could help him.

You took a bag from him and staggered under the weight; you were tiny and your lungs hardly worked even back then, before the fevers and the asthma and your crooked spine really laid you low. But you shouldered the burden and said, _I know where to go — come on, I’ll take you there_.

And he followed you as you soldiered on against the crowd and led him back to his apartment building where his mother was waiting for him, where you could hear the relief in her voice as she thanked you for helping him even as she scolded Bucky for being gone so long. That’s how you fell into each other — no heroics or burning buildings or mean old dogs. Just Bucky at your back, following your lead as the promise of home danced tantalizingly ahead.

* * *

A lot changed for you after the serum. Everyone knows it — these are facts written in history books, and biographies, and research papers. It seems as though every person in America knows the story of how the serum transformed you from a 95 pound asthmatic to a 200 pound athlete in the span of minutes. People mainly focus on the height and the strength because they are the most glaringly obvious changes, but the serum changed all of you, every bit of you, deeper than they can see. It’s sometimes easy for you to forget that. Your memories didn’t change with your height; in your mind you’re still smaller than everyone else, still weaker, still just trying to catch up. But you’re not small anymore and with your new lungs, you can outrun anyone.

Running was the first thing you did when you emerged with your new body, and it’s still one of your favorite things to do. You didn’t realize before the serum how wonderful a full breath could be because you had never really had one. You love running — you love the deep breaths your lungs can pull in, you love feeling your legs burn with the strain of making yourself go faster, and it’s fun because you actually _can_ go faster. More than anything, running reminds you that you really are different than you were before. Stronger. Better.

Changed.

Now your legs ache with strain as you pound the treadmill in the gym of Stark Tower. Your body is still sore, but recovering, and it feels good to just _move_ after spending a week stuck in bed. Your injured stomach burns with the exertion, but you keep moving at a punishing pace, running towards nowhere.

You hear the elevator doors open efficiently, but you don’t stop your pace. It’s Sam. You can tell by the sound of his steps, light on the gym mats, and by the faint scent of his deodorant.

“I’m pretty sure running a marathon was not advised in the discharge papers,” calls Sam, his voice echoing on the walls of the massive gym.

“They never explicitly stated that I _couldn’t_ ,” you gasp between strides. You’re breathing harder than you normally would, but that’s nothing really surprising. You need to get back in shape. You need your body not to fail you again. The feel of your feet smacking the treadmill feels good through the pain.

“Man, what are you doing?” he says, stopping in front of your machine, glaring as you wheeze through your steps.

“Getting back in shape,” you say. Sweat trickles down your temple as you force your body to keep moving, keep putting one foot in front of the other. You can ignore the ache if you pretend the pain isn’t yours. “I need to be prepared.”

“For what?”

“I need to find him.” It goes unspoken who ‘he’ is.

Sam puts his hands on the top of the treadmill, right over the screen displaying your unnaturally high heart rate. “You just got out of the hospital two days ago, and he really did a number on you. You need to let yourself heal.”

You press the button to increase your speed. You’re nearly sprinting at this point. “I am healing. This helps — trust me,” you say, voice catching slightly. You’re not sure if it’s from the exertion or from the lump in your throat that forms as Bucky’s phantom fingers ghost over your neck, choking the air from you for a moment. You gasp, and then gasp again, work through the ache in your lungs and muscles and remember how to breathe. “He’s out there somewhere and I … I have to be ready to find him.”

“I don’t think that's going to be as simple as you think,” says Sam quietly, and it’s the fact that he doesn’t look up at you, keeps his eyes trained on the controls of the treadmill, that finally gets you to slow down.

You lower your speed to a jog, then a walk, and then you stop all together. Your muscles feel like jelly, but you stay standing as you step off the machine. “What do you mean?”

Sam finally looks you in the eye. “Have you seen the news at all this morning?”

“No,” you say. You’ve been here all morning, trying to outrun your ghosts. “Why?”

“JARVIS, play CNN.”

“Yes, sir,” comes the disembodied voice, and all the screens in the gym flicker on.

There’s the standard footage of the Battle at the Triskelion, the same stuff they’ve been playing for over a week now. But instead of the usual headlines of SHIELD’s downfall and Hydra’s secrecy, there’s a new one: _SUPERS TO BLAME?_ And there are pictures of you in the midst of the destruction, a red, white, and blue blur amongst the carnage. You step towards the closest television, your fingers itching to reach out as Natasha’s face appears on footage of her testimony to Congress comes on again.

“What?” you say, a whisper.

The screen switches to Alexander Pierce, and the marquee reads: _OVERSIGHT NEEDED TO RIGHT SHIELD’S WRONGS_. Pierce’s voice, quiet because of the lowered volume of the television, is unwavering as he stands behind a podium and answers reporters’ questions about how to make the world safer, how to make sure that this situation never happens again.

Sam’s eyes are hollow as he says, “I don’t think they’re going to let us go off on our own for a while.”

* * *

You shivered as you watched your mother hand over a few of her last remaining nickels to a man crouched lowly on the street corner, huddled in a blanket to ward off the chill and the stares from passersby. The wind cut through your raggedy coat that night. Everything you owned was raggedy — your coat, your shoes, the shirts your mother mended so carefully every time you ripped one. She pulled you close to her body and you felt warmed, just for a moment. 

_Why did you do that_? you asked, the words nearly frozen on your tongue. Those nickels were wood for the furnace, eggs for breakfast. They were far and few between back then.

She used her arm to rub your shoulders with a rough mitten-covered hand, bumping into you as you walked closely with her down the sidewalk. _Because he had nothing, and I had something to give_.

_But_ ... The words died on your tongue. Your stomach clenched around the painful emptiness that had plagued you for the past few years, since your mother had lost her other job, since it seemed as though everyone had lost their jobs. The sound of those nickels _clinking_ into the man’s hand filled your ears and brought tears to your eyes. He had nothing, but what did you really have?

_Steve,_ said your mother, her words hot and misty on the December air, _that man needed help, and what do we do when we see someone in need? We find a way to help them_.

It was her mantra, ingrained in your mind since you were so very young. She shook her change purse lightly, and your heard coins bang into each other in its confines. _‘Give: and it shall be given to you.’ Remember that, Steve_.

You looked out to the rest of the street, where people shuffled along with the wind, bundled in their coats, where countless others laid under awnings and didn’t get your mother’s help because they never asked for it, even though they needed it desperately. The world was full of people worse off than you, poor as you were. Her words sunk into your chest and warmed you more than wool. Even you, small, stringy Steve Rogers, had the power to make change if you let yourself. You just had to find a way to help.

* * *

Tony looks like he hasn’t slept in days. There are bags under his eyes and a weariness you haven’t seen in him in a long time, not since the few precarious weeks following the Chitauri invasion, when you know every time he closed his eyes, he saw space and stars and a closing portal, and felt the suit shutting down, felt himself stop _breathing_. There is a different battle now that haunts him, one he never even fought, but one people will blame him for anyway. 

He sits in front of the television with one hand on the remote, turning it louder, and the other running through his hair. There are lines on his face that you don’t think were there before last week, when the news broke that Rumlow had been using Stark tech to supply Hydra for years. It had been Tony’s own designs that had been used to build the helicarriers, and Tony hadn’t been quick enough to pull that information out of the cloud before someone had downloaded the files and leaked them to the press. 

The media is still having a field day with it. On the screen, MSNBC analysts are currently trying to tally the exact amount of deaths that can be attributed to Stark weapons and technology over the years. The number is staggering, even to you, and you fought in the deadliest war in human history. Tony looks like he could vomit.

You sit down on the couch next to him, and you don’t really know what to say. What could you possibly say to make this better? You know this is not entirely Tony’s fault, that although he helped design the weapons, he couldn’t have known what Rumlow would do. Tony had thought he was keeping the world safe in his own way. His eyes are glued to the television, to what you know will show the graphics of his designs that they’ve been flashing on the screen all week. You can’t look at them. You keep your eyes trained on his face and say, “Tony —”

“What was he like?” says Tony, cutting you off without taking his eyes off the TV. The bright light that bathes his features makes him look sick.

The question throws you because you don’t know who he’s talking about. “What?”

“What was he like?” he asks again. There’s a picture of Howard Stark on the television screen as the anchor talks about the history of Stark Industries. The sight of Howard makes your chest ache, but you know why Tony is asking. You’ve read the files that Tony managed to pull from the leaked Hydra data, the personal ones, the ones no one cared to look into at first when Tony’s designs were begging to be looked at and copied. The image of Howard Stark’s body, broken like a limp puppet against a car, flashes to your mind. Your stomach had burned with bile as you realized what the Winter Soldier had done to Tony’s father, and one of your friends. This is personal for Tony, just like it’s personal for you.

“Howard was —”

Tony’s eyes are dark and brown, just like his father’s — _Howard’s_ — as he cuts you off. “No, not him. Barnes. The Winter Soldier. You grew up with him — what was he like?”

You blink rapidly. The casual way he links them together has you reeling. They’re not the same person in your mind, and it’s impossible for you to reconcile the memory of Bucky’s warm arm around your shoulder with the feel of his cold, metal fist choking the life out of you. The Bucky you knew before the fall was a completely different person than the man who almost set the world on fire. 

“He was always bigger than me,” you say and close your eyes, and you can almost see his face, clean and full and whole as the day before he left for war. If you focus, you can hear his voice in your ear, exasperated and begging you to exercise caution just _once_ before throwing yourself into the next fight. “But he was always stepping in to keep the peace and to keep me out of trouble. He was funny, or at least all the girls thought so.”

Tony nods slightly, and the light flashes red on his face as the picture on the television changes. “And now?”

“Now I’m not sure if I know who he is anymore.”

“But you’re still thinking of going after him, even with Pierce breathing down our necks.”

He says it like a statement of fact, a testament to how well you’ve come to know each other over the past two years. He knows what you’ve been thinking ever since Pierce warned the world about what was coming. You nod in agreement.

“I guess I just want to know why, after everything he did — after he nearly killed you — do you still want to find him? What makes you think you’re going to find the man you lost in 1945?”

“I don’t,” you say, and it’s the cold, painful truth. You swallow hard. “But Bucky never left me behind when we were little. He’s one of the main reasons why I’m still alive and here. I can’t leave him out there.”

Tony squints at you in the artificial light. “You have a lot of faith in yourself, you know that right?”

You snort out a laugh. “Someone has to.”

“We do,” says Tony, and he means the Avengers. You swallow thickly and nod because you don’t think you can find the words to say what that means to you. “And I want to help you find him — JARVIS has been pulling surveillance information, and he thinks he’s still somewhere on the eastern seaboard.”

“Why would you help me with this? After what Bucky did to your parents.”

Tony rubs his wrists and nods at the TV screen. “Barnes may not be the only one of us who helped Hydra achieve its goals.”

You wince. “Tony, that’s not your fault — you didn’t —”

“I know, I know,” says Tony, waving you off. “But I get it. I know what it’s like to have your weapons used by someone who shouldn’t have them, and I want to help.”

“Thank you,” is all you can say around the tightness in your throat. 

But Tony isn’t looking at you anymore — he’s looking at the screen again, where death and destruction plays on a constant loop. Tony’s hands are clenched so tightly together that they’re bloodless, and you can almost hear the wheels turning in his brain: _How do we prevent this? How can we stop the destruction_? 

You don’t have the heart to tell him that you don’t think it’s possible. War is a siren call in peoples’ bones, and the only thing you can do is try to minimize the damage and help people when you can. There is no preventing it. There is just the fight, and then the aftermath. An endless loop.

On the screen, pieces of a helicarrier slam into the Potomac time and time again until you finally have enough of Tony’s radiating guilt, and you shut the TV off and the screen goes black. 

* * *

You can still remember winter in Brooklyn, remember how cold would get, how it seeped through the cracks of the window and stole the breath from you, chilling you from the inside with each inhale that you took in. There was no escaping it, not then, not with the money you had. You were always sick back then. Always aching for some relief from the cold that your mother tried to ward off with the little furnace that hardly worked. Your breath rattled in your chest as the winter wind rattled the glass of the windows. The cold was your life; you froze many times before you crashed that plane.

But you also remember Bucky there with you, holding you close under the covers when your mother was at work and couldn’t, trying to ignite fire in your bones when there was no other way to keep you warm. You remember his arms around you, his heart beating against your back, his skin warm against your own, his breath hot on your neck as he whispered, _don’t go, don’t go, please, don’t go, please_. He kept you alive all those winters that you should have died, when the cold nearly sapped everything from you. 

Even after your mother died, he was there, under the covers, saving you from the chill. There, in his arms, under the blankets in Brooklyn, was your home, and you haven’t been able to find anything quite like it since.

* * *

Natasha and Sam are a near-constant presence with you in the Tower. You see the others every day of course, but it’s as if the two of them have some sort of unspoken agreement as you heal: _do not let him out of our sight_. It’s probably for the best. Without them, you would have run off chasing the memory of your oldest friend while you still had stitches in your gut. But you’re healed now, as healthy and whole as you were before the fall. You’ve never been able to sit still for long when there is a challenge calling to you.

You’re ready to move.

With Tony’s help, the three of you have been able to piece together a vague idea of the Bucky’s movements from the past few weeks. Stark tech is truly amazing. From the latest intel that JARVIS helpfully sent over earlier in the evening, he is not in the D.C. metro area anymore. He headed south at first, deeper into Virginia and North Carolina along I-95, but the satellites lost him when he veered back north into still-uncharted backroads. He’s heading back towards you, but you don’t know where he’ll actually stop.

The three of you are holed up in Natasha’s bedroom, using her king bed as a table. The television is a low hum in the background. Reporters have dug deeper and have found more information about the Winter Soldier and traced him back to Bucky Barnes. And they keep putting the images on screen over and over, replacing the fall of the helicarrier and the destruction of D.C. Bucky, sunny and smiling in 1940. The Winter Soldier, standing over Howard Stark’s prone body. Bucky, with the rest of the Howling Commandos ( _and you, right next to you_ ). The Winter Soldier, with a gun in his metal, outstretched hand. 

Your past, present, and future in one endless loop.

“At this point, they’ll catch him soon before we can,” says Sam, pointing to the television screen. On air, a retired two-star general is talking about the military’s counterterrorism capabilities and how they’re likely preparing to strike against the Winter Soldier as we speak. As though they can bomb a ghost.

“That’s not going to happen,” you say hotly before you can even try to keep the emotion out of your voice. “If the military were capable of catching him, they would have done so a long time ago.”

“They thought he was a myth before.”

“They won’t find him,” you say. You won’t let that happen. “They won’t get the chance.”

Natasha shifts on the bed and looks up at you. “Steve.”

“What?”

Her eyes are trained on you. “They won’t find him, no matter what bullshit Sam spews.” She ignores Sam’s indignant _hey_ , and continues: “SHIELD wasn’t the only organization that knew about the Winter Soldier before this all went down. The military has been trying to locate him for years. They thought something like this could happen.”

“They knew about Project Insight?”

She rolls her eyes dramatically. “No, but they knew about his hits. He’s been on their watch list for decades and the only reason they haven’t been able to take him out is because his programming is too good; they normally can’t catch a whisper after he lands a hit on a target.”

“Normally,” Sam repeats. And you catch the _but_ in her words as well.

“The only time anyone has come close to catching him was back in ninety-nine,” she says. Her eyes grow distant. Thoughtful. “It was after an assassination at the U.N. He normally vanishes after a hit, but he stuck around on the streets for a while afterwards. Just wandering.”

“Wandering? What, like a tourist?” you ask, your eyebrows lifting upward to your hairline.

“No,” she says slowly, like she’s testing out her next thought. “More like he was lost and didn’t know how to get home.”

_Didn’t know how to get home?_ “How do you even know this?”

“I did some digging after he shot me.” She shrugs. “I don’t take kindly to someone else gaining the upper hand.”

“And the point of this little anecdote _is_? To let us know that it’s going to be nearly impossible? That we only have a shot to catch him every quarter century and we just blew it?” asks Sam. You can’t help but silently agree.

Natasha stands up and crosses her arms, glaring at you both like you are complete morons. “The _point_ is that he was almost caught because he was off-balance. And do you know why I think he was off balance?”

She stares out the window to where the city lights shine in the moonlight. The bustle of the night through the open window — so natural and unassuming before — nearly deafens you. And then you get it.

“He was in New York,” you say, your pulse quickening. “He came home.”

“He never had a mission in New York before that, and never had one after. Maybe something from his past broke through.”

An image of the Winter Soldier, his fist raised and ready to strike you again, springs to mind. _You know me_ , you had said to him on the helicarrier and watched as his expression broke. _You know me_. And though he denied it and hit and hit and hit you, you know he remembered. He pulled you from the river, after all.

“He knew me,” you say, and the words taste like a victory on your tongue. “We can find him.”

Sam looks pensive, and maybe just a little bit hopeful. But Natasha’s wicked grin nearly matches your own. “We’ll find him.”

* * *

You won the first fight you were ever in, by some miracle. It was a fluke. It surprised everyone that you — a tiny, wheezing wisp of a thing — landed a punch so hard to Jerry Donnelly’s jaw that it knocked him on his back, but you did it, you won, and it felt as though the grin could never fall from your face as you saw him run away. You drew your small body up to its fullest height, weightless, and you acquired a taste for it, for victory. But victory was a language you never quite learned. Over the years, you learned to fight, yes; to win a battle, maybe. But victory meant defeating your enemy, and yours just kept coming back in droves so frequently that it was all you could do to keep your back straight and fists raised.

Bullies loved to pick fights with you. Maybe it was your bony arms or crackling chest or spindly legs that made it hard for you to run away. Whatever it was, they always found a way to mess with you. You did not win your second fight. Or your third. Or anything, really, until after the serum.

One day, two of them chased you down into an alleyway one time after school, trying to steal your jacket for scraps of linen. Your chest heaved and your legs burned, and you could feel them at your heels. But there was a fence at the end of alley, one so high you couldn’t hop it easily. You slammed into the chain links and turned quickly, ready to meet them face on. One of the boys reared his arm back and you brought your arms up to cover your face, and —

_What are you doing?_ Bucky’s voice echoed off the brick walls of the alleyway. He stalked up to them, and you had never been more glad than in that moment that Bucky was older than you because he towered over them, glaring down at them with disgust. 

One boy looked ready to tackle Bucky, but Bucky just raised his eyes and then his fist. The boys looked at each other, and then Bucky with wide eyes before bolting. 

_Thought I told you to wait for me_ , he said, looking you up and down.

_Yeah, well_ , you gasped out in between wheezy breaths. 

_Let me know if they come after you again,_ said Bucky, glancing back over his shoulder to the street where they had escaped. _One of them was Tony DiScala, and he knows not to mess with me anymore, not after I gave him a black eye last year._

You glared at him — how easy life would be if you could make problems vanish with your hands, if your voice was loud enough to scare people away. _I can take care of myself, Buck_ , you said, the words clipped and surly.

He gripped your shoulders and smiled. _I know, but you shouldn’t have to_. You looked into his eyes and you saw respect there, not pity like you saw from most people. He respected that you stood up and fought back, again and again, even though every instinct should have told you to lay down and take it. He was proud of you, even as he stepped in to save you. Your lips curled into a smile, and you held his gaze steady, and then in that moment, you realized that he would follow you anywhere, and you would follow him to, side by side, till the end of the line. He slung his arm around your shoulders and led you out into the sunlight, and that boy would make you bleed someday, you knew it then.

* * *

Alexander Pierce calls a meeting about three weeks after you're released from the hospital. You and the other Avengers have known it would happen sooner or later; the news is a constant cycle of suggestions on how you can be contained.

He looks older than he did before the fall of SHIELD. You suppose that Brock Rumlow’s infiltration of the world’s most prestigious and lethal security organization must have been a personal blow for him, but you’ve seen the news, seen the endless hearings and press conferences the man has handled in the wake of D.C. The weight of the world has aged him past his years. 

It’s aged you, too.

“The world is scared,” says Pierce, placing his hands on the back of a chair, sweeping his eyes across the room before settling on you, the man he knows more than the others. “What happened last month in D.C. has reminded world leaders that national security is not as straightforward as we used to think. There are beings out there more powerful than an army, able to bring the world and its people to their knees.”

He pauses, and the room is quiet. The tension is palpable as you all wait for what he has to say.

“The world is immeasurably grateful for your service. Some of you joined SHIELD, or the army, and helped agencies to take down threats. Others have acted on their own accord, and the world applaudeds you for your bravery. But one fact remains: for years, enhanced beings have been able to operate under their own authority, without the necessary checks and balances that a normal military group is required to have. The Avengers, as it currently stands, answer to no one,” he says, tightening his grip so that his knuckles are white. “And the world is terrified of what you can do with that power.”

Next to you, you can feel Natasha tense while Thor’s fingers crackle with electricity. Pierce’s words almost do not sink in. You’ve fought to save the world, fought to eliminate threats and expose harm, but now that makes you a threat.

“Nations are calling for oversight. For years, SHIELD operated fairly autonomously and because of the lack of regulation, a sickness was able to infect our intelligence system and nearly destroy the world. Enhanced individuals — superheroes, as many like to call you — have no organization to answer to anymore, and the United Nations will not stand for it. That’s why together, 117 nations have drafted the Superhuman Registration Act.”

“Sir?” asks Rhodey. You close your eyes. _Registration_?

“There are more enhanced individuals walking this earth than the public was aware of before Agent Romanoff leaked SHIELD’s files. There are people with the ability to stop threats, but also create them as well. The leaders of nearly every country in the world feel it is unacceptable to let potential weapons of mass destruction walk around unregulated and unknown. The people of the world have the right to know what they’re up against.

“In three days’ time, the United Nations will meet to ratify the Superhuman Registration Act. All of you will be required to sign the Act and register yourselves in a database kept by the UN. You will report to a panel of world leaders who will determine when and where you can act. You will respond to threats only when the panel deems it to be necessary, as the UN believes this to be the best way to reduce civilian casualties and destruction. You will only be deployed when your help is proportional to the threat.”

“With all due respect, sir,” you say, although you don’t even try to project an inkling of respect into your tone. “I don’t understand how registering one group of citizens is going to reduce casualties.” Rhodey sighs from across the table. Tony looks at you as though you have grown another head. You wonder what the room looks like from outside the glass walls — do they see the frustration?

Pierce narrows his eyes at you. “Do you support the firearm regulation, Captain? Do you carry a license for the gun that the government issued you? Tell me how the world is wrong to ask us to keep a record of the different weapons that could do it harm.”

“So we’re weapons now.” You clench your fists under the table. 

“You are what you create,” he says, and looks from Bruce to Tony, who look gutted. You temper flares because Bruce didn’t mean to create the Hulk, and it wasn’t Tony’s fault that SHIELD used him and his knowledge and ingenuity and genius to create something evil under the pretense of protecting the world. You start to protest, but he switches tactics. “You were in the army, were you not, Captain?” 

“Yes,” you say tersely.

“And did the army let you galavant across the globe to where you were not authorized or needed?” he asks, and you almost laugh because has he read your file? Azzano was not sanctioned. “No, there was a chain of command, and soldiers are expected to follow orders, not create splinter groups that disrupt military plans.”

“What if we don’t sign this?” asks Sam, pulling Pierce’s gaze from yours. “What happens to us?”

“The Avengers cannot continue to act without authorization.”

“What about retirement?” you ask. What if you could walk away from it all? What if you didn’t need to be a weapon, didn’t need to worry about death and destruction and civilian casualties? An image springs into your mind, one you cherished and nurtured during the war: a white house along the shore, the breeze on your face, Peggy’s hand in your own. No war. No death. Peace. Could you have something like that if you walked away?

Pierce stamps out that hope immediately.

“The Avengers cannot continue to act without authorization,” he says again.

You clench your jaw and see the others’ faces slacken in alarm. Did he mean —?

“You want me to sign away my right to choose? How Todd Akin of you,” says Clint wryly, and Natasha grips his wrist in warning. 

“So we’re supposed to act as puppets of the UN, or else _what_?” you bite out. 

“The UN will be forced to neutralize threats to the safety of the citizens of the world.”

Everyone quiets. The room is still. Outside the glass walls of the conference room, agents continue their work without pause. Do they know the gravity of their work? Do they know what will happen in three days time? Do they have the ability to walk about despite whatever secrets they may know?

Pierce straightens his jacket and grabs a bound document, sliding it down the table so that it rests before you. “Take the time to read it. The world expects to see you in Vienna on Friday — transportation has already been arranged.”

He leaves and you watch him through the glass walls, your pulse racing as your eyes follow him until he exits the office. No one speaks for a moment; no one knows what to say, or how they would even say it. You thumb open the pages of the Act, flip through it and see ‘ _unauthorized action_ ’ and ‘ _registration must include name, ability, identifying markers’_ and, most ominously, ‘ _secured in the Raft_ ’. The Raft had been mentioned in news reports all month long — a high security prison that SHIELD developed long ago, but the files that Natasha had leaked made no mention of where it was located. This was the first confirmation you had of its existence.

They were going to put you in jail if you didn’t follow their every order.

“Fuck,” says Clint, finally breaking the silence. He runs his hands through his short hair roughly. “Fucking shit.”

“Three days,” says Bruce weakly.

“I do not understand how Earth’s rulers have the authority to dictate how we conduct our lives,” says Thor, and he looks pissed. “On Asgard, we revere our warriors for their deeds, not punish them for what is outside of their control.”

“Well aren’t the people of Asgard just so sensible?” says Sam snidely, and though Thor glares at him, he chooses not to rise to the bait. The tension is already charged in the air.

You close the bound pages and hold them up. “They’re giving us three days to read this and sign it. It’s over a thousand pages — we need lawyers, we need time to negotiate,” you say. The pages are heavy in your hands, heavier than they should be.

“I don’t think that’s an option, Cap,” says Rhodey wearily. “This is the UN we’re talking about. This has the weight of the world behind it.”

“So let’s say we agree to this thing,” says Sam, “How long is it going to be before they low-jack us like a bunch of criminals? Before they try to paint us as the people we’re supposed to protect the world against?”

“It’s one hundred and seventeen countries who want us to sign this, Sam. That’s millions of people that are telling us to stand down. And you just want to say, ‘fuck it’ because you think they’re being unreasonable.”

“It’s a hundred and seventeen countries and leaders, each with their own agendas,” you say, and the others turn to look at you. You think of the Lumerian Star, of Fury hiding the true meaning of your mission from you, and your resolve deepens. You worked for SHIELD, for Fury, and thought you knew what you were fighting for. But you didn’t. “I don’t want to sign ourselves away to people with hidden agendas. We need to negotiate.”

“I’m not sure there’s time”, says Bruce. “They’re ratifying the Act in three days.”

“So we push back. I’m not saying we can’t sign it,” you say, even as your heart constricts painfully as the image of that white house on the shoreline dissolves before your eyes. “I’m saying I don’t feel comfortable signing it until we know who’s going to be directing us.”

“Tony, you’re being uncharacteristically non-hyperverbal,” says Natasha, and you all turn to look at Tony who has his head in one hand, eyes closed.

“That’s because he’s already made up his mind,” you say.

“Boy, you know me so well,” says Tony, snapping his eyes open to look at you all. “I don’t understand the heistation - there’s no decision making process here. We need to be put in check. Whatever form that takes, I'm game. If we can't accept limitations, we're boundless. No better than the bad guys.”

You think of Tony’s grimace as Pierce brought up the helicarrier designs. You know how he must feel, you know how he’s tried to repent for all the times his designs have been used to hurt people he never wanted them to. But you can’t understand his unwillingness to push for safeguards against something that will control the course of not only your lives, but the lives of anyone like you.

“Tony,” you say gently, trying to make him see you, make him see what you see. “Agendas change. What if the UN sends us someplace we don’t think we should go? What if there’s a place we need to go, and they don’t let us?”

“Who gave you the ultimate authority over what we should and should not do? How can you sit there and be so selfish that you think your own authority supersedes the will of billions of people?”

You shut your mouth and see red for a second. You don’t even know how to respond to that. _Selfish_? You want safeguards, not ultimate authority over international security. _Selfish_? Did he really —

“I have to sign it,” says Clint unsteadily. He looks resigned and unhappy. “I’ve got a wife, I’ve got _kids_. What am I supposed to tell them if they haul me off to prison?"

“I have Jane,” says Thor gravely in agreement.

“Pepper,” says Tony, his eyes far away. 

The others nod and you can see the path before you: they will sign, and they will not fight. They all have families and friends that need them. They have so much more than you do, and they are not willing to risk it all for their personal autonomy. They will sign it despite the glaring problems.

But you don’t know if you can. You’ve never been able to walk away from a fight that you believe is right. You’ve never been able to walk away from a fight at all.

* * *

The ruler whistled through the air and landed with a sharp _thwack_ on your bony knuckles. You wrenched your hand off the desk involuntarily, but Sister Mary Alice grabbed it and put it back in place so she could rap them four more times. After she was done, you cradled your bruised hand to your chest and glared at the ground.

_What have you learned, Steven?_

You didn’t answer right away. You didn’t think you could — your lip was so swollen that moving it seemed impossible. Beside you, Bucky nudged your foot with his own with a hiss, directing you to answer. With a wince, you curled your lips to form the words. _Do not fight with others,_ you mumbled.

_Look at me when you speak_ , said Sister Mary Alice, not unkindly. She took no pleasure in punishment, you knew from experience. But she wanted you to understand the reason behind the ruler. _There is no shame in making mistakes — hold your head high, Steven — only in failure to change. What have you learned today?_

You lifted your trembling face and felt the bruises pull at the skin around your eyes. _Do not fight with others_.

_Even if?_

_Even if they start it._

Bucky twitched, his elbow hitting you in the side. It took all your effort not to glare at him. 

_What does the Bible say about fighting back_?

You sighed and closed your eyes to refrain from rolling them. _‘The Lord will fight for you, and you shall hold your peace.'_

_Very good_ , she said, reaching down to grasp your shoulder. _Be steady, and He shall provide_. _You will come across countless Ronan Gallaghers and Michael Hallorans, but let them fight. Do not stoop to their level._

_Yes, Sister_. You said, and to your relief, she finally let you go with Bucky trailing behind you. It wasn’t the first time you’d gotten in trouble for fighting back, and it wouldn’t be the last. No amount of scripture could convince you to lie still when a fist came at your face. No words could make you stand down when you knew something was wrong.

* * *

The daylight has gone by the time you leave the conference room. Another day passed without you even realizing it. Your skin itches with restlessness, with the need to move. Tony doesn’t look at you as you brush past him, and in your mind, all you can hear is: _how can you sit there and be so selfish?_

Your legs move so fast down the hallway that the others would have to sprint to catch up to you. The skyline flashes in bursts through the windows as you stalk your way to the stairs. You throw the door up and start upwards toward the roof, toward fresh air and a quiet place where you can hear yourself think. The stairwell echoes with the sound of your feet punishing the concrete in your race to get to the top. _Selfish_. Is it really selfish to ask for more time, to press for more information to see if you can trust the people who are going to be loading you like a gun and pointing you at the next problem that comes? Is it selfish to want control over who you get to protect and who you’re made to kill?

When did your life become less valuable than of those around you? When did you become cannon fodder, a man they could throw to the wolves again and again because even if they made you bleed, you always got back up, always kept fighting, always put your life on the line to save another — when did you stop caring whether the bullets hit you or not? They tell you: _save the city, save your country, save the world_. They made you forget how to save yourself. You used to be good at that, at survival, but it’s like they sucked it from your DNA and replaced it with big muscles and thick skin and strong bones. They want you to sign the SRA to control you, to send you out to clean up their mistakes and take the hits they can’t. They want you to lay down your life because that was what they expected you to do when they gave you the serum. You’re not Tony or Sam or Rhodey — you can’t take off the suit and become a normal civilian. How can you stop being you? The serum is a part of you now, and it’s not your fault that you’ll never stop being a weapon. 

You never wanted to be a soldier, not really, not even when you tried again and again and again to enlist; not when they fixed your lungs and gave you a new life; not when they gave you a gun and a shield and told you who to shoot. When you were younger, you wanted a house by the sea, air that was clean, a body that wouldn’t fail you, a life that couldn’t be taken from you with the snap of fingers. And then you met Peggy Carter and you saw her with you there, in that house that you dreamed, and all you wanted to do was lay by her side, draw her sometimes. Love her always. You went to war to give people that dream that you had, not because you craved the violence, but because violence is a part of you, and it can’t seem to let you go. 

Would they have ever let you retire, before the Registration, or would they have made you fight their battles until your last breath? Soldiers retire all the time. They complete their tours, go back to their families, and they try to start anew. You never signed up for a tour. They told you to save New York, so you did, and then they told you to save humanity, so you did that, too. They assume you want to fight, and really, what else would you do? Who are you without a shield on your arm, a star on your chest? Once you would have known, but you were a different man, with different bones and lungs and stamina. Who are you without violence — without a war?

You gave your body to the government and they made it lethal — they gave you the strength and stamina and raw power that they fear now. But whose fault is that, really? They see the mistake now: it’s never good to build a weapon you can’t control; never good to let a gun have a mind of its own. _Selfish_ , you hear, and you could nearly punch through the door to the roof in your haste to feel the night air. It’s selfish of them to assume that you wanted to give up your life to fix other’s mistakes.

You open the door and are greeted with noise. The city is alive tonight — you can hear it in the air as you step out onto the roof, noises carried on the cool night breeze: people laughing as they walk down the sidewalk; sirens wailing down below; music, sweet and low, coming ever so softly from an open window in the building across the street. You were once a part of the bustle, a speck on the ground, really, while bigger men looked down at you from their balconies. You miss the freedom your old body afforded you. This body is a cage.

You hear fingers drumming on metal and turn to see Natasha to the left of you on the edge of the roof, her arms supporting her as she leans against the rail, gazing out across the skyline. You didn’t even hear her follow you from the conference room. She says, “Rogers.”

You walk to her and lean down to see the lights flicker against her face, reflected coolly in her eyes. She is wound tight and unhappy. You open your mouth to speak, but you don’t have words. You’ve never been good at saying the things you feel out loud; it’s one thing to think those thoughts in your mind, but you’re used to swallowing your wants until the lump goes down your throat and you feel like you can breathe again. You don’t know how to articulate your thoughts, but Natasha does it for you:

“I’m not signing it.”

“You’re not?” you ask, although you can’t say you’re surprised. She was quiet during the meeting, and you know that means she’s thinking ahead of all of you. 

She shakes her head and finally looks at you. “I thought about it for a second,” she says. Her gaze is steely, eyes trained on your face. “I put everything out there. Everyone knows what I’ve done and I’m fine with that, really, I am. But at SHIELD, I was at least given a choice as to where they sent me and which missions I took — all of my actions there were my own. I’m not going back to being a weapon without a mind.”

You nearly sag in relief at her words because there it is: the crux of it all. What you’ve been trying to say all day but couldn’t find the words. People like Tony Stark will never understand what it’s like to be remade, what it’s like to have someone rearrange your DNA to make you into something they can use to hurt. You’ve never been good at telling people how you feel, but you think now, maybe, you can try.

“When I signed up for the army,” you say, looking upwards, to the sky, to the past, “all I wanted to do was help people. We kept hearing all these terrible crimes — mass atrocities — that the Germans were committing, and when we finally went to war, it meant that we could _do something_ about it. Fix it. Help people who couldn’t get help from anyone else. The serum gave me that chance, and I loved it. I finally felt useful for once.”

“Steve…” she says, taking your hand. You pull away and fully face her.

“I died thinking that I was fighting the good fight, and I thought that if I could just land a plane in the water, it would put an end to all the bad stuff going on in the world. And then I woke up and tried to catch up, and I read that we keep making the same mistakes over and over again. They _made me_. They cooked me up in a lab to end the war. To end _all_ war. But we keep fighting, and it never ends.”

Natasha nods and crosses her arms. This high up, she’s illuminated against the inky black sky. There are no stars shining down to see you, no neighbors who can hear you. It’s just you and her; you two alone. “Pierce has been with SHIELD for longer than I’ve been alive. While Director Carter —” you barely flinch at her name anymore, “— started and grew the organization, Pierce gave it legitimacy through the World Security Council. He ran SHIELD before Fury did, and even after, he knew everything that went on in the organization. Everything.”

“You think he knew about the Winter Soldier. Project Insight.”

“How could he not? He was too willing to help me and Fury when we were trying to stop Rumlow. He didn’t hesitate to pick up that gun, even though it should have been a shock to him that his most trusted agent was a traitor.”

“You have any proof?”

“No,” she sighs, shifting a bit. It’s telling that she’s this frustrated. “I thought it all might come out in all the data dump, but Pierce is either extraordinarily good at covering up his tracks, or I’m just off my game.”

“I’ve never known you to be wrong about something like this,” you say, and she smiles at you, a small gesture of trust. “What are you going to do, without this?”

She throws her head back, leaning up against the railing once more. “Oh, you know. Find a beach somewhere, read a book. Take up knitting.” 

The absurdity of the picture your mind conjures up of Natasha sipping a drink while laying on a beach startles a laugh out of you, but your mind wanders. You know what you'll do. You have no family here, no skills you’ve fully developed that will treat you well in life outside of the army. You’ll be a fugitive, on the other side of the law, and you’ve been a national figurehead for most of your adult life. But you will find him, with or without SHIELD or Tony's help.

“They’re going to come for us when we don’t show up at the signing ceremony,” says Natasha, pulling you from your thoughts. She takes your hand again and grips it tight. “I know that I’ve blown all my covers, but I’m good at finding new ones. I asked you before: do you trust me?”

You do, with every fiber of your being. She’ll always be known as the double agent, but you know she’ll be true to the things she cares about. She’ll be true to you. “Without question.”

“We'll find him, Steve,” she says. “I can take us of the grid, and we'll find him — we'll figure the rest out as we go. It’s fun, being on the run. We’ll go —”

Your cell phone rings, loud in the cool night air, startling the both of you. The call is unexpected — everyone who would likely call to chat has graciously given you the night to think about what to do, and they know you want to be left alone. You pull it out of your pocket to find Sam’s face — when did Natasha even program that? — smiling at up from the screen. You answer it: “What’s going on?”

“You need to come down here,” says Sam without preamble. His voice is shaky. “Find Catwoman wherever the hell she is and come to the living room. It’s all on TV.”

Natasha pauses in front of you, and, heart thudding, you ask, “Sam, what’s happening?”

He pauses, takes a breath. “It’s the Winter Soldier. He’s in Brooklyn.”

He's home.

* * *

Bucky left that night, the night of your mother’s funeral, not because he wanted to, but because _you_ wanted him to leave. Your skin crawled with the need for you to shed it; it felt foreign, and too small for your aching, swollen heart to fit inside. The apartment was too small for both of you, and you ached for space, at least for one night, and you told him so. His eyes searched yours for a long time at the door, and his gaze held all the things he wouldn’t say out loud again, not after the first time. _Are you going to be okay? How can I help, where do you need me Do you need me? I’m here. I’m with you ‘till the end of the line. I’m here_. But in the end, all he did was hug you so tightly that your ribs creaked like an old dining chair, and he said: _I’ll be by tomorrow, Stevie, I promise_. 

And then he was gone. And you were alone.

The apartment was quiet again. It was just you, you alone with the peeling wallpaper and the bathtub countertop and the ratty old chair that she loved so much. You closed your eyes and tried to breathe in as deep as your shrunken lungs would allow. It was the breath that did you in. You couldn’t smell her perfume anymore — she hadn’t sprayed it in months and you hadn’t realized that, hadn’t realized she had run out of it, hadn’t realized she would never purchase a bottle again because she started to cough and cough and cough her way into a hospital room and then a morgue. There was a sweater of hers hanging on her chair and you grabbed it, brought it close, and breathed it in. Her scent was there, fading with every inhale you took. You looked around again and were amazed at how little of her was still in the apartment. A chair, a few clothes, a small stack of well-loved books. The rest was stuff you shared, and looking at the few meager possessions that were just well and truly _hers_ made the knot loosen in your chest as the tears finally came.

There was no stopping it — no stopping the throbbing, pulsing loneliness you felt with every step you took on the well-worn rugs of your tiny apartment floor as you stumbled to the back room where the bed was. You collapsed on the mattress and clutched the sweater tighter to your chest, and it didn’t even occur that you were losing her faster that way, rubbing away what was left of her scent so that it just mingled with your own. She was already lost to you, and it was all you could do to hold on to what was left of her.

Why did you make Bucky leave? It didn’t make you feel better. You had felt too full before, too full of grief, too full of it to talk to him. But you were empty all alone. All along. Why didn’t you just let him stay? He wanted to help you. Why did you push him away?

You never found the answer. You just clutched her what remained close to your heart, and tried not to let it go.

* * *

“Well, shit,” says Tony, as he lands, his face guard retreating into his armor with an unspoken command. You couldn’t have summed up the situation better yourself. The fire department is still trying to get the flames under control, but they’ve spread to other buildings, and hundreds of people stand shivering in the cool spring night. The rest of the Avengers begin to assemble a plan — evacuating citizens, clearing the road — but you can’t find it in yourself to move. You know this place. You _know_ this place.

You’ve somehow managed to avoid Brooklyn in the time they brought you out of the ice. SHIELD tried to set you up with an apartment in your old neighborhood, but the thought of that made your throat constrict painfully and you asked for a placement in a different city, one that maybe wouldn’t remind you of every piece of yourself that you have lost since you decided to take an old German scientist up on his offer to fight Nazis. For all the time you’ve spent in Stark Tower, that’s really all you’ve let yourself see of New York in your downtime before you returned to D.C. or the field. It’s changed in small ways, in big ways, and it’s changed in ways you didn’t realize would hurt. You don’t recognize the businesses anymore, and the air smells different even under all of the smoke. It’s like a sucker punch seeing how everything has changed without you.

But nothing hurts so much as seeing your old apartment building burn down to ashes in front of your eyes.

That’s what he did. He set fire to your old home and let it burn to the ground. The city kept it as a museum, perfectly preserved, and even though you didn’t ever go to see your old place, it was nice to know that a piece of your old life hadn’t changed. And now the Winter Soldier has taken that and turned it to ash. He’s gone without a trace from what you can make of the words of local law enforcement carried on the night wind, but certainly left a mark. 

“Cap?” says Clint quietly next to you, pulling your gaze away from the flames. You turn to see the team staring at you, eyes compassionate but their bodies tense, ready to move. They’re waiting for you to give orders, all of them, even after all of the arguing today. They’re counting on you.

You swallow thickly around the lump in your throat. “I — we’ve got to —” you say, and swallow again, steeling yourself. The past is burning all around you, but you can be steady. From what you can hear the firemen saying, there are people still trapped inside the buildings where the fire has spread. You have a job to do. You can be their leader. “Widow, Hawkeye — you guys go help with crowd control. Bruce, you check to see how we can help medical.”

They nod and turn to leave without hesitation. _At least I’ve got control of this_ , you think, releasing your breath steadily. You turn to the others an point to the top of the burning building

“Iron Man, War Machine, fly the perimeter and see if there are people in the upper floors and let us know where we —”

“What do you think you’re doing here?” calls a voice, and you still your movements while the others do the same. Even Natasha, Clint, and Bruce stop what they’re doing to watch Pierce stalk towards you from behind the police cars, framed by the flames of your old life.

“Helping, sir,” you say. You feel Sam and Thor move behind you, and you feel more secure now that your back is guarded. “We’re here to help people.”

Pierce stops in front of you, standing tall in the smoke. The Avengers close in behind you, facing Pierce. He sweeps his eyes from left to right, measuring them, before finally settling on you. “On what authority?”

The question leaves you reeling. You’ve never been asked about why you were saving lives — you were always expected to do what you could. “Sir?”

“Who authorized this mission, Captain?” says Pierce, lifting his chin so that if you didn’t know better, you would think he was of a height with you. Behind him, you see Natasha glaring at Pierce while touching Clint’s shoulder as if to hold him back.

“It’s not a mission if there’s no enemy to combat, sir. We’re here to help civilians.”

He scoffs. “You’re here for the Winter Soldier, not the civilians. Did anyone your team read the Act, or did the two thousand pages of legislation mean nothing to you?”

“Sir, we couldn’t —”

“The Avengers were not called to the scene because the World Security Council did not sanction this mission. You have not signed the Superhuman Registration Act,” says Pierce, taking a step closer. Above the sound of the flames, you hear people crying as they watch their lives and livelihoods burn and float like snow that lands on their shoulders. “Until you all do so, the Avengers will not be called upon at all.”

“But surely the nature of this attack warrants our help,” says Thor, his voice booming in the flickering, flaming night. “An assailant of his caliber cannot be restrained by normal law enforcement.”

“We can bring him in, sir,” says Rhodey, and your throat constricts even more at their tones of voice. They don’t sound as though they want to listen to Bucky’s side of the story before they bring him in.

“You are not authorized to —”

“Iron Man and War Machine can get to the top floors faster and safer than any firefighter,” you say loudly. From behind you, Sam lays a hand on your shoulder to check you, but the frustration starts pouring out of you, and you don’t think you can stop. You shrug off his hand and stand straighter than you were before. “Thor and I can lift the debris more accurately than a standard clean up crew. We came here to help, not fight, and you won’t let us do that because of some pieces of paper?”

Pierce narrows his eyes and looks at you like you are a specimen to be deconstructed. “Those pieces of paper are a direct result of the world finally realizing that people like you cannot go around unchecked. The law is the law for a reason. When you sign the Act on Friday, you’ll perhaps be given the chance to bring the Winter Soldier to justice. Until then, Captain, take your team home.”

With a last lingering look, he turns from you to rendezvous with the chiefs of fire and police. You look to the faces of your teammates; they are as nonplussed as you are, it seems, to be told that upholding the law is more important than saving innocent lives.

The flames do not die before your eyes. The front facade of your old apartment building finally caves, and you flinch as you see first responders scrambling backwards in an attempt to avoid the fallout. Your legs ache with the urge to move, to _help_ , but they must have turned to lead because you find you cannot move them an inch. They are rooted to the spot. The team looks on as they call for more water, more support, and you know that the events of tonight will only make the calls for the SRA stronger. The Winter Soldier caused this, but it’s Bucky who will pay for it, and you are going to be the one to take him down and bring him in. 

You look down at your shield glinting in the light of the flames. The reflection of your burned past dances across the vibranium surface. You close your eyes and nearly choke on the ashes and bitterness that pass through your lungs with every inhale. There are people all around you, calling for you, calling for help, and there is nothing you can do.

You turn away from it all. 

“Move out, team,” you say, and feel them fall in behind you uneasily.

And then you do what is against every bit of training and instinct that has been instilled in you: you walk away from the fight.

Natasha and Sam flank you on either side, pressing into you, telling you that they’re with you without saying it. You turn to meet both of their gazes. They’ll be with you, you know it just looking into their eyes, till the end.

* * *

You spent the night before Bucky shipped off to basic the only way you knew how: together, like you had been for years and years. He managed to swipe a mostly un-drunk bottle of whiskey from his father after dinner, and you spent the rest of the night at your place on the fire escape, staring out at the city before you and at the below below you as they passed by. There wasn’t much to say that night, but you were together. He was pressed against your side, and his breath was a warm breeze that ruffled your hair, and you were together.

_Where are they sending you?_ you finally asked. The words burned your throat more than the whiskey as you took a long swig from the bottle. You didn’t usually care much for it, but that night you did.

_Wisconsin,_ said Bucky, the smartass. 

_And after?_

He took the bottle from your hands and looked at it, not taking a sip. He swirled the amber liquor in time as he swung his legs in rhythm off the edge of the fire escape. Staring off into the cityscape, where the lights from Manhattan winked at you through the alleyways and across the river, he said, _Well, I imagine they’ll send me off to war._

You smiled even though you didn’t want to, and it felt too tight across your lips. You shoved his shoulder and he laughed, nearly dropping the bottle off the side of the metal rail. _You know what I mean_.

_I don’t know_ , he said, taking a sip at last. He swished it around in his mouth for a while, swallowed, and gasped out a breath. _Jesus, that’s strong. Hope they don’t send me to the Pacific though. The thought of sweating through my uniform everyday like Father Eamon during a mass in July could make a guy wish for winter_.

With a laugh you said, _Watch out, they’ll hear you and put you on the first ship out_.

He laughed even though it wasn’t funny. None of it was funny. You thought of your father, the man you never knew, the faceless presence looming in your mother’s heart and your own shadow. He died at war, gasping for a breath that would never come as gas burned his lungs and skin and eyes. All you could think was that could be Bucky in a few months’ time. Bucky, dying young, alone in a trench on the other side of the world. Dying without you.

He was sitting so close to you, but you leaned even further against him so that you were flush against his side. His heartbeat was loud in your ear as you rested your head against his shoulder; he was alive and breathing and _there_ and you didn’t want to imagine a tomorrow without him in it. You wanted to say: _Don’t go, don’t leave me, I won’t be able to watch you, I won’t be able to see you, don’t go, please, don’t go without me, don’t go._ Those words sang an angry song in your vessels, burning you, making you feel as though you would bleed them out. What you actually said was: _They’re gonna take me one day, Buck, and I’m gonna be there with you._

He wrapped an arm around your shoulders and jostled you a bit. His voice was soft, almost too low to hear above sounds of the city and the beating of his heart, but you think he said, _Sure you will, pal, come and find me_. And under the hazy night sky and twinkling windows, you swore you would.

* * *

Your pulse is a thrumming beat in your veins as you gather everything you need to make a quick escape. You know Sam and Natasha are gathering their things as well, even though you didn’t ask them to. They just took one look at your face on the ride home and they knew what you were thinking. You shove what you can into a bag — socks, underwear, pants, your compass — and zip it all up without folding anything properly. There’s no time — Pierce’s men are scouring the city for Bucky already, and they won’t take kindly to finding you bucking the orders to stay put and sign their Act. 

Natasha enters the room as you finish gathering the last of your things and pick up your shield. She’s shouldering a small backpack — clearly, she expected this outcome at some point in time, or perhaps she’s always been ready to leave, ready to disappear into the wind at a moment’s notice. “Hill can get us transport out of New York, we just have to rendezvous on 10th and 145th.”

“Did you call her before or after we went to Brooklyn?”

“I called her before we had the meeting with Pierce this afternoon,” she says, smirking just a bit because she’s always more prepared than everyone else. “Keep up, Rogers. Sam’s waiting by the elevator.”

You follow her out of your room without even a glance backwards, without a goodbye to one of the only places you’ve called home in the past few years. You’re ready to leave it all behind because it’s what’s right, you feel it in your bones, in your soul. Pierce may be willing to use you as a weapon, but you will not let him. You will be your own man.

Sam is waiting by the elevator, just as Natasha said he would be. He nods to you. He’s ready. 

“Are you both sure?” you say, looking to both of them. You’re asking them to go on the run with you, to run and run and run and never stop. There will be no security. You will always be running. “You don’t have to come. I don’t — I can’t ask you to do that for me.”

Sam shakes his head at your words. “I’m coming with you.”

“I told you, I’m not signing it. I’m done being a pawn,” says Natasha. 

Your heart swells at their words. That’s it — they’re with you. There’s no turning back. You turn to press the button that will take you down to the city, to Maria Hill, to an open and dangerous road, but the doors slide open of their own accord to reveal Tony, out of his Iron Man suit, looking pissed.

He steps out of the elevator and points to the bag in your hand, the shield in the other. “JARVIS told me you were packing — a little early to be heading to Vienna, isn’t it?”

“Tony —”

“I know that must where you’re going,” he says, stepping closer to you, “because you’re not stupid enough to go anywhere else, not before we sign the SRA.”

The three of you are silent. None of you move.

“You’re leaving,” says Tony flatly, “without even talking to us. You’re not even going to consider sticking with this team or even talking it through, you’re just going to tear us apart to go chase after a fucking ghost.”

“Hey, man,” says Sam, gripping your shoulder to pull you away from Tony and towards the elevator. “You know that’s not what this is about.”

Tony’s nostrils flare and his voice rises in volume. “Then what is this about? Did you hear what Pierce said earlier, or were all of your ears so clogged with nonsense that you blocked it out? They will fucking _arrest you_ if you go after him. There will be no more team if you walk away.”

“I know,” you say. There’s nothing else you can say.

Tony’s eyes are bright with anger as he points a finger at your chest. “They are going to make _us_ arrest you. They’re going to make us chase after you, and put you in prison, and watch you rot there.”

You take a deep, shuddering breath. “I know.”

Tony shakes his head and says, “Sometimes I want to punch you in your perfect teeth.”

Natasha steps around him and pushes the button to the elevator. It opens — clearly, Tony did not come here to forcibly stop you. Looking at him, you don’t know if he has it in him to do so. He doesn’t move as you go to shuffle into the elevator, leaving him in the hallway.

Without turning around, he says, “If you walk through that door, you won’t be an Avenger anymore. You won’t be Captain America.”

You pause before the threshold as Natasha holds the doors open, waiting for you. You look down at the shield — the object that has saved your life so many times, the red, white, and blue paint shining in the light of the hallway. It feels heavier in your hand than it ever has before. You stare at it, clenching your fingers around the cool metal so hard that it hurts. In the white star, you see the memory of Howard handing it to you, smirking; of Peggy with her gun raised, eyes gleaming; of Bucky catching it in his metal fist; of the shield falling into the Potomac along with the rest of the world. You blink, and all you see is ice.

“I know.”

You drop the shield in the hallway and step into the elevator, just as Tony turns around. The shield lays at his feet, a burden you no longer need to bear. His eyes, shining and angry, are the last things you see before the elevator doors shut closed, taking you down and out into the night.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Jesse, who betaed a good portion of this back in 2018!


End file.
